Not necessarily true, I think most of those votes would go to the most popular populist candidate or the one with a better PR team, it wouldn't be truly random distribution.

That's a lot of assumptions that I can't agree are inherently true. Forcing people to participate might not make them think at all beyond fulfilling the duty and not paying a fine, and random votes might not balance out the charismatic leaders at all - if anything the charismatic populist leaders that focus on good PR over substance will probably gather up more of these uneducated "just circle something" voters than the others. It is where/why marketing and commercials work so well in the first place and I'd rather not give even more power to this type of brainwashing, it is a popularity contest enough as it is.

If anything, I'd make it so in order for people's votes to count they need to show at least a very basic understanding of what they are voting for and what are the implications of it.

How is it better if someone just goes and circles a random name on the list because its mandatory? If someone doesn't follow politics and isn't educated enough to pick a good candidate, or motivated enough to research them, I think it's better to not vote at all than to give it up to either chance or a superficial gut feeling based on constant propaganda barrage. A person that votes like that just makes your vote less impactful, statistically speaking.

It's a weird game. You're not really supposed to play it like a game and have fun like in a game lol, if that makes sense.

For example - you should avoid combat if you can. Take only one or few enemies at a time and that's if you are in good condition (not panicked, exhausted, in pain, malnourished and drunk at the same time)

Never run anywhere, it just tires you out and creates noise. Calmly walk away from zombies and lose them by breaking LoS. This takes practice and is generally tedious

Don't do fun stuff like rely on vehicles or guns too much, at least in the early game. They are noisy and attract too much attention, you use them once you have enough ammo and a place to fall back to in case it goes wrong. Cars are great once you have a secured base away from the main city areas but aren't that useful for city exploration.

Bases are not really safe. You can barricade all you want but if one zombie starts banging on it, soon the others will join due to noise. Generally you want to be out of reach and hidden rather than well defended. Proactively clear out the areas you spend a lot of time in.

etc. etc. It's much more of a simulator than a game at times, for better and worse. I have a love hate relationship with it xd

Valheim was one of the best selling games and is still a huge success. Indies are getting better and more popular to the point that even big companies like Nexon are indiewashing their studio and pretending that Dave the Diver is an indie game with pixel art instead of a work of one of the biggest publishers there is. In my experience most of the gamers nowadays are people that grew up on minecraft, terraria or probably more likely today - roblox.

So basically no, I don't think so. Maybe big studios want you to believe that and it might be true for a casual FIFA or CoD gamer but for anyone else, there are more options than ever and the supply of good smaller simpler games is just overwhelming, the days are too short to even keep track of them anymore.

It is getting more present at work every day, I keep having to hear even seniors how they "discussed" something with chatgpt or how they will ask it for help. Had to resolve some issue with devops a while back and they just kept pasting errors into chatgpt and trying out whatever it spewed back, which I guess wasn't that much different from me googling the same issue and spewing back whatever SO said.

I tried it myself and while it is neat for some simple repetitive things, I always end up with normal google searches or clicking on the sources because the problems I usually have to google for are also complicated problems that I need the whole original discussion and context too, not just a summary that might skip important caveats.

I dunno, I simultaneously feel old and out of touch, angry at myself for not just going with the flow and buying into it, but also disappointed in other people that rely on it without ever understanding that it's so flawed, unreliable and untrustworthy, and making people into worse programmers.

There will only be an exodus if there is a better alternative than Lemmy/kbin. Remember that twitter was still going strong despite mastodon existing until bluesky won the race and became the new twitter. If reddit somehow manages to collapse one day, most of the people won't go to lemmy because it's already been shown it's not an attractive or equivalent replacement for it, so either something new reddit-like appears or nothing changes.

Bsky has actual people from twitter I wanted to follow that never bothered with mastodon

I haven't even started with satisfactory 1.0, I'm still behind on DSP the dark swarm update. Factorio coming out soon and I'm eyeing Alan Wake 2 that's on a sale right now, while I just recently bought the DLC for Against the Storm that I only played for a few hours.

I need help

Guys its getting harder and harder every year to still hope this turns out okay

In some ways I wish they cut even more, act 3 felt bloated and very badly paced to the point it felt like a slog to get through.

I have 0 expectations or hopes for it. Hope some people find it fun, I personally have such a backlog of good games from trustworthy and beloved developers that the only way I'm going to get this is on a 80% discount in a few years, if ever.